The Forums of GDCFL and this website are hosted by Sim Nation. Sim Nation has many sports leagues that are free to join. Most require software similar to Bowl Bound College Football to play. Currently at Sim Nation there are leagues based on International Soccer, the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), College Football, and College Basketball. Sim Nation also has a vibrant set of Forums for all its leagues.

History of the GDCFL

Most of the initial members of the GDCFL are a group of veteran gamers who played an online college football simulation called Gridiron Dynasty. Many in that group did not like the engine changes made by the designers of Gridiron Dynasty and began looking for a new college football simulation. CougDawg (our GDCFL Commissioner) suggested a league based on Bowl Bound and the GDCFL was born. The GD in GDCFL is a recursive acronym. While GD is an abbreviation used by both players of Gridiron Dynasty for their game and also by players of Grey Dog Software, it means neither in GDCFL. So, "GDCFL is not Gridiron Dynasty", nor is it Grey Dog Software!

We like to think the GDCFL is unique in college football simulations. Our league started with every team in the Big 6 Conferences (sometimes called the BCS conferences) having the exact same prestige and the initial teams were generated with a very similar talent level. The conference setups are very similar to real college football with a couple of changes to get 10 conferences of 12 teams. Independent teams were moved into a conference (Notre Dame and BYU to the Big 12 to give them 12 teams, Army and Navy to the Big East for the same reason). We also combined the WAC and Sunbelt conferences into a single conference called Sunbelt to make up our 10 conference world. Please see our Coaches page for a detailed breakdown of our teams and conferences.

We have a mechanism in place for coaches to move teams from one of the 4 "mid-major" conferences (Sunbelt, Mountain West, Mid American, Conference USA) to feed teams into our big 6 conferences (Big East, Atlantic Coast, Southeastern, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific 12), as well as a mechanism for individual coaches to move up to better teams or down to worse teams based on their coaching performance. Please see our rules page for more details on how this process works.

An overview of a GDCFL Season

Our league is based on a series of turns (or weeks). There are 3 phases in a season called Training Camp, Season and Off-Season. The entire process is detailed in the Bowl Bound Manual.

The Training Camp phase consists of 6 turns, normally completed in 2 weeks (at a pace of one turn on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday). In this phase you set your budget priorities, offensive and defensive philosophies, out of conference schedule, and redshirt players for the upcoming season.

Next is the Season Phase, which is covered in detail in the Bowl Bound Manual, starting on page 11. This phase is where teams play 11 or 12 regular season games (8 of which are in conference games, while either 3 or 4 are out of conference games). At the end of the Season phase is our post season. We have a 16 team playoff and there are 27 other Bowl Games for teams who did not make the playoffs. This means a total of 70 teams (of our 120) make the post season. There are depth charts, play books and game plans for offense and defense, with injuries, academic suspensions, and in-season player development thrown in to make it interesting. The season phase is a total of 21 game weeks long, at 2 game weeks played per real week. This means the Season phase takes 10 real weeks to complete.

The Off-Season phase is next. In this phase we hire our assistant coaches, sign transfer players, recruit new players, and set our training priorities for the upcoming season. The Off-Season phase is 6 turns long and we will play it in 2 real weeks (turns running on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday). Then we start over for the next season in the Training Camp phase.

So, a full GDCFL season is approximately 14 weeks long and we will play about 3 seasons in a calendar year.